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On Saturday, April 26, at 7 p.m., Counterpath hosted Brenda Hillman for a reading.

Brenda Hillman has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, and EmPress; she is the author of nine full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Practical Water (2009) and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). Hillman teaches at St. Mary’s College of California where she is the Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry; she is an activist for social and environmental justice and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

About Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire:

“Fire–its physical, symbolic, political, and spiritual forms–is the fourth and final subject in Brenda Hillman’s masterful series on the elements. Her previous volumes–Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water–have addressed earth, air, and water. Here Hillman evokes fire as metaphor and as an event to chart subtle changes of seasons during financial breakdown, environmental crisis, and street movements for social justice; she gathers factual data, earthly rhythms, chants to the dead, journal entries, and lyric fragments in the service of a radical animism. In the polyphony of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, the poet fuses the visional, the political, and the personal to summon music and fire at once, calling the reader to be alive to the senses and re-imagine a common life. This is major work by one of our most importnat writers.”